Nearly two-thirds of women in the US military who filed sexual assault complaints last year said they faced retaliation, according to a Pentagon report released on Friday.
The study found that the number of sexual assaults in the military declined last year, echoing the conclusion of a US Department of Defense report released in December last year. However, the new study said the number of attacks in the fiscal year that ended in September last year might have been slightly higher than the figure in the December report.
Even as sexual assaults were reported to have declined, the Pentagon said more service members filed assault complaints, and about a third of attacks were now being reported. The study attributed the rise in reports of attacks to a “greater confidence” among victims that their complaints would be properly handled.
US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter outlined steps that the military was taking to reduce the thousands of sexual assaults that occur each year. The initiatives include updated training, a new strategy to prevent retaliation and a biennial survey of sexual assault and harassment throughout the military.
However, he appeared well aware of past criticism of the Pentagon’s portrayal of the increase in assault reports as a sign that victims were more comfortable filing complaints. Critics say that previous studies did not fully substantiate the military’s conclusion, and that rising reports of attacks could mean that assaults are increasing.
“Despite our efforts to date, the fight against sexual assault is far from over,” Carter wrote in a memo released with the new study. “I am concerned that far too many of those who report the crime perceive some kind of retaliation.”
While the study found that 62 percent of women who filed sexual assault complaints believed they were the victims of retaliation, it offered no comparable figure for men, who are far less likely to be assaulted.
The new report included two sets of figures. The first was based on a standard employed by the military in previous reports, which sought to measure “unwanted sexual contact.” The second was developed by the RAND Corp to better align the definition with language in the military’s legal code, the Pentagon said.
Using the standard of unwanted sexual contact, the Pentagon estimated that just under 19,000 service members were assaulted last year, a drop of about 27 percent from 2012. Those figures were initially reported in December last year.
The new RAND standard, which the Pentagon plans to adopt, estimated that about 20,300 service members were assaulted, a difference that falls within the margin of error of the studies.
The number of attacks actually reported last year was 6,131, an 11 percent increase over the previous year and a 70 percent jump over 2012.
The new study also found that women and men experience and react to sexual assault in different ways. Male victims are more likely to be subjected to multiple assaults in a year, are more likely to be assaulted in the workplace and are more likely to see the attacks as hazing, not as assaults.
The inclination to write off sexual assaults as hazing could mean that men underreport assaults, the report concluded.
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